Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Roman Imperial Coin Concordance: Roman Imperial Coin Crowd Sourcing

This project has been formulated by Daniel Pett (British Museum) and Ethan Gruber (American Numismatic Society) to aid
with the assignation of Roman Imperial Coinage (RIC) identifiers.

At the time of writing, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database holds details for over 200,000 Roman coins. Many of
these fall into the Imperial coinage category. In August 2016, the facility was introduced to integrate with Online
Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) and tie the two resources together. This relies on the
PAS records being assigned a standardised identifier, and has presented a computational problem that can possibly be
solved by Human interaction with automatically generated results.

In this project, you will be presented with a coin from the PAS database which has potential matches to RIC identifiers
drawn from OCRE and matched by computational methods by Ethan Gruber using the RDF triplestore
created by Daniel Pett. Each coin has up to 4 matches and we would like contributors to choose the most likely match, or
if an exact match is impossible, to indicate that this is the case. We hope that the tutorial explains exactly how to
proceed.

Once 5 people have checked and attributed the coins, we'll consolidate data and then update the PAS database which will
then populate the ANS OCRE platform with PAS examples.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.